Spots in the second round are quickly filling up here in the NBA playoffs, with only Game 7 standing in the way of setting the final eight. Most eager to see their foe: the Heat, who will get the winner of Saturday’s Nets-Bulls finale. If it’s Chicago, Miami will be wondering whether the Bulls will activate a certain star point guard. For this week’s Throwin’ Elbows, we’re hoping so:

Showing playoff guts, or not

We’ve seen Warriors forward David Lee, slated to be out for the rest of the postseason with a torn hip flexor, at least suit up and attempt to give his team a few possessions. We’ve seen Bulls guard Nate Robinson, struck with a stomach virus, in the starting lineup, scoring 18 points and playing 42 minutes despite needing to curl up with a trash can so he could vomit during timeouts. We’ve seen his teammate, Joakim Noah, hobble through games with plantar fasciitis, and one of his opponents, Nets guard Joe Johnson, do the same.

Yet we still haven’t seen Derrick Rose. And the more we see other players sucking up their own health woes, the harder it is to give Rose a pass for his continued absence from a team that desperately needs him. The Bulls are so battered by injuries that Robinson was one of four starters to play 42-plus minutes in Thursday’s Game 6 loss, the bench giving the team just seven points in a combined 28 minutes.

Rose won’t be back for Saturday’s Game 7 against the Nets in Brooklyn, that much is clear. For his teammates and coaches, that’s not a problem—at least publicly, they’ve been saying all the right things, supporting Rose’s decision to continue to sit out following last year’s ACL surgery. “We don’t worry about Derrick,” Bulls star Luol Deng said at the outset of the Nets series. “We have played all year with our team the way it is. Whenever Derrick is ready to play, he will play.”

Of course, Rose actually is ready to play, and no matter what his teammates say, his continued absence has to be registering with them. Starting guard Kirk Hinrich has been out with a calf injury, which has forced coach Tom Thibodeau to use either rookie Marquis Teague or to simply go without a point guard. The Bulls haven’t needed Rose to give them 35 minutes and average 25 points. They just need warm bodies that can be effective in 15-20 minutes per game.

Increasingly, it looks like that’s the impediment to Rose playing, more than his concerns about how much his brain will trust his knee. If he comes back, he wants to come back and be Derrick Rose the MVP and not Derrick Rose the backup to Nate Robinson—even if that means abandoning his team as it has scraped its way into a Game 7 against a much better roster. The Bulls lost Game 6, and their best shot at advancing, by three points at home. A few minutes of Rose, even at 80 percent, might have made the difference.

The backside of his rehab from ACL surgery last year was slated to be one year which is, you know, 365 days. We’re at Day 356 of the Rose Rehab. In Game 6, he should have been playing, even just a little to give Robinson a break. He is not at risk for further injury—except, maybe, for some bruised pride

About last night …

For the Warriors, the final 8:33 of Thursday’s Game 6 win over the Nuggets was, to say the least, harrowing. They had built an 18-point lead, but in a wild finish, they found almost every way possible to kick away a series win, and Denver, in the end, had two chances to tie or win the game, but simply missed shots.

If you missed the ending, here’s a quick recap: The Warriors attempted 10 shots over the final 8:33, and made three of them. Of the seven misses, three were on 3-pointers, two were airballs and two were blown layups. They made four free-throws, two of which came on a blocking call on JaVale McGee that clearly should have been a charge on Warriors rookie Draymond Green. They also committed eight—yes, eight—turnovers in that stretch, four of which came on inbounds passes.

The Warriors, to their credit, withstood all of that and moved on to the second round of the postseason. What matters most for this group is that, under the gauntlet of the playoffs, they nearly cracked. You just can’t do that. That’s the kind of lesson that only experience teaches, and considering coach Mark Jackson had two rookies (Green and Harrison Barnes) on the floor for the bulk of the fourth quarter, plus second-year man Klay Thompson out there for all 12 minutes, there will be no shortage of teachable moments from that game.

“Each possession, it was like, it can’t get any worse than this. And then it does,” said Stephen Curry, who was making his playoff debut in this series and made four of those eight turnovers. “We gave them every opportunity to get back in the game. We’ve got to keep our composure in that situation. There was a lot of miscommunication, a lot of playing on our heels. We’ve got to learn from it. That scenario hopefully won’t happen again as we move forward.”

The Warriors have an exciting young core, and should they keep building, they figure to get themselves into the mix of the top teams in the West in the next two or three years. They dodged a Nugget comeback on Thursday, but they all need to watch tape of the final 8:33, over and over, until it is burned into their minds so that, as Curry said, it won’t happen again.

Phil-ing up in Motown

Detroit owner Tom Gores is a friend of coaching legend Phil Jackson, so it makes some sense that as the Pistons search for a replacement for coach Lawrence Frank, Gores has turned to Jackson, bringing him in as a consultant on the team’s coaching pick. In a statement released by the team on Thursday, team president Joe Dumars said that was A-OK with him, saying: “Tom and I discussed using a consultant as part of our decision-making process in our search for a head coach and we feel that Phil Jackson is a great resource to use. I look forward to talking with Phil next week.”

But bringing in Jackson to help execute what is one of the primary functions of Dumars’ job has raised some question about Gores’ intentions in regards to Dumars. The Pistons haven’t made the playoffs in four years, and the team has gone 111-201 in that span. Moreover, Dumars’ track record for coaching hires has been odd—he has gotten some good ones, including Frank, Larry Brown and Rick Carlisle, but they’ve all made quick exits, with Detroit looking for their seventh coach in the last 12 years.

Dumars did resuscitate the Pistons as a franchise, getting them to two NBA Finals and winning them a ring. He is also a franchise icon. But Detroit ranked just 28th in attendance this year, and as the memory of the mid-’00s heyday fades, the Pistons need some immediate improvement. It’s unlikely that having Jackson as a consultant for one hire is going to make much difference, but it could signal Gores’ willingness to make further front-office changes.